Egypt’s factories are being asked to build more at a time when borrowing is getting more expensive. Every pound tied up in scrap, rework and returned goods now costs more to carry. Prof. Wael Badawy, a computer vision specialist and patent holder, explains what AI cameras catch that human inspectors miss and why he sees inspection as essential rather than a nice to have. He also covers whether security cameras can be reused, what it takes to export without rejection, and how a factory can keep quality records that cannot be tampered with.
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Can AI Cameras on the Production Line Protect Factory Margins When Capital Costs More?
What does the camera catch that a human inspector actually misses?
Cameras can detect anything a human can detect, and much more, because they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They do not have bias and they do not go to sleep. In factories we can look at safety, making sure people are not in danger areas near moving parts. We can also look at quality control through production. If you are producing a piece of metal and you want to make sure it meets specifications, an array of cameras can do that. From about 28 years of experience, we look at factories where an array of cameras checks the quality of things like large screen displays and how devices are assembled. This is not about replacing humans. It is about guaranteed quality.
How big is the cost gap between a defect caught at the machine and one caught by the customer, and where does it show up in a company's accounts?
Cameras have very high resolution, so they can find small things like a missing screw or a missing bolt on a piece of metal, which a human usually cannot see because they are tiny. In Egypt we have worked on applications such as testing washing machines for water leaks, which a human cannot do. The cost is buried inside the name of the brand. If you are exporting products from Egypt, they have to be one hundred percent perfect, with no defect whatsoever. To get into that category you need automated quality assurance and automated testing, because humans can miss what they are looking for when it is too tiny.
When borrowing gets more expensive, capital spending is usually the first thing cut. Is AI inspection a nice to have that gets shelved, or one of the few investments that pays back fast enough?
It is a must have, not a nice to have. If you produce products that do not work, or that have a minor defect the quality assurance group did not detect, you are damaging your brand and nobody will come back to buy from you. It gets more drastic when you talk about exporting. One of the biggest solutions for Egypt now is to develop products quickly and export them so the country can earn foreign currency. Nobody will import a product with defects. They will refuse it overseas, and then you cannot export again because your name has been damaged. In agriculture, for example, Egypt is now using different kinds of imaging to detect things like worms and eggs inside fresh produce, and there are a number of agencies developing inspection solutions. To have a robust export channel you have to maintain good quality, and that means automated inspection.
Many Egyptian plants already have security cameras. Can those be turned into inspection tools, or does a mid size factory need new hardware?
Usually you need new hardware. Security cameras are built for cost, and they are usually placed away from the inspection lines. For inspection you need high resolution, high quality images. Operation cameras are a special type of camera and are not usually mixed with security cameras, which is why we always recommend new high quality cameras.
Inspection footage could become proof of quality for a foreign buyer or an auditor, but only if it cannot be edited after the fact. What makes a factory's quality record trustworthy?
With automatic real time quality assurance, we program the cameras to detect defects in real time. The footage is stored in an encrypted way, and some of the bits or pixels are maintained so that any tampering with the footage is detected. The machines do not record just a video that anyone could edit. They record on secure devices with a secure mechanism so the videos are not tampered with, because it can get really nasty. If a product is sent back and a customer wants their money back, we may end up in court. It is not just having a record. Once you issue evidence like a video recording of an inspection, it is evidence against you, and it can harm you if you do not secure it.